Anatomy of Loving Someone
by Nerumi H
Summary: It wasn't envy. It was protecting all he'd helped her rebuild in her life. *Major gore.


.title.: **Anatomy of Loving Someone**

.summary.: **It wasn't envy. It was protecting all he'd helped her rebuild in her life.**

.characters.: **Sukone Tei - Hatsune Miku - Kagamine Len**

.warnings.: **Major gore**

.cover art by.: **総会計のん＠ぴくセミP組**

.a/n.: **First Tei fic :\ Even though the plot is pretty common, please get through it and tell me what you think...? ^^; I liked writing it, especially the ending, heheh.**

**X**

If you close your eyes and count to ten,

You'll wake up losing your walls

If you close your eyes and count to eight,

You'll wake up losing your fingers

If you close your eyes and count to six,

You'll wake up losing your eyes, your abilities.

If you close your eyes and count the way I did,

You'll wake up losing everything.

**xXxXxXx**

When the death count submits to the life count, you've become nothing more than a number. Not even the number listed—you're hidden under.

You're the seven billion and fifth, while it shows seven billion, a hundred, ninety-three, give or take a few bodies who are so inhuman we don't want to count them in our resume.

You're the seven billion and fifth,

And you're going to become the six billion and two hundredth death due to the certain category your environment has shoved you into. A touch of a spire, iron blood, gaping skin, a body against your own; a taste that burns your throat, a consuming entity, fire or ice.

A twisted mind?

How can they...

Ever...

I've sworn for years and years that I wasn't a doll, I wasn't to be pushed around. I had eyes like a fairy's and limbs like chopsticks that people wouldn't stop snapping. If I could have gotten the tongue, too, perhaps I'd have been okay.

Maybe then I would have whined for them to stay, for them all to stay? Then they'd have stopped?

It's a child's nightmare, to be left behind, especially in this earth that you're always taught to fear and not to embrace.

I wasn't waking up, the night I was closed behind doors of a world that was going to pull me into it, swallow me up, garnishing my corpse with promises and good food and soft rooms and identical children who smile too much but actually have the force-fed lies stewing in their stomachs.

For years they closed me behind, and I still asked, when was I to wake up?

When was my time?

Was my body in a coma, sunken deep under the ocean, being chewed apart by disease while my spirit sits here, solid, in a corner of a room and ignoring the other lonely totem children playing around me?

**xXxXxXx**

Totems, they're alone, they needed me to become one of them for we all had the same wish—that we'd become a city all on our own day.

If they needed _me_, specifically _me_, the little girl with the blood eyes and scissorhands—then they've surely not succeeded, even today.

Forever they'll stay in that building, little lost people with no parents to pet them to sleep, while I'm out in the air.

It sounds pleasant for me, now doesn't it, to be out?

When they'd taken me out, scratched a few papers with ebony and fastened a few leashes, I was out of the circle of totems and the no longer pressure swallowed my back.

A happy ending; with my new family, we drove in a small car of growling horses, and spoke to a fantasy every night and before meals. They changed me from my totem self and made me to a girl, but still,

I'd been dropped in the first place, so those artificial couldn't quite heal me the way they wanted to.

**xXxXxXx**

When calendar pages flipped, I grew my hair to my ankles and whispered my truths to the imaginary hope still, touched ice gates and mumbled to the rust. Pews and piers were my walls into the planet, to keep away the totem thoughts.

Mother, Father, kept their heads on straight just for me.

I'd turned into a person, but still, I was lost without my true skin to hug me and tell me they loved me.

**xXxXxXx**

I'd started out useless.

**xXxXxXx**

When I closed my eyes, the world dropped dead.

I used to do this, sitting on the school's walls, to be alone as I was every single day.

The world fell into ash and mute screams, and what remained was a black abyss, and a smoke-like body surrounding me.

Sometimes, He would choose to throttle me,

Just because of my lips against the rusting grate.

When I opened my eyes, the cloak was lifted, and I found myself back in this earth where I was missing my skin yet surrounded by the soft skin-coloured bandages.

**xXxXxXx**

When I opened my eyes that day, one bright morning that sizzled my blood to a blooming boil, I saw him.

A head of glossy blonde, a body surrounded with a sweet tasting personality, eyes like glitter and were made of impenetrable facade glass.

How I wanted to smash the glass when you first said "Hello," to me, because I believed you were a liar with that greeting. Behind the glass surely would be the true feelings?

_... 'Why?_

_Why is she there?_

_So withered, so useless?'_

"I'm Len. Are you new here?"

Mirror shattered in my palms, and you allowed me to drop the glimmering to the very abyss.

**xXxXxXx**

The second I saw you and I stopped seeing the stitching sunlight shadow pattern on my lips—the pattern thatch of the grate—the world stopped dying on my wish.

You took a figure and became the smoke of my imagination; you breathed in everything I said and returned oxygen to me. When I could see myself reflected in your eyes I knew I had a listener who would never stop breathing for me.

I had skin again,

It was everything I needed, everything I wanted,

You were nothing and everything

You were just another part of the seven billion, hundred, ninety-three, but you were the number that never stopped being posted, where everyone could always see you.

I think you liked that, too, well, maybe I _know,_

Because everything could be read after the glass that I sometimes wonder if it ever even existed shattered.

**xXxXxXx**

What gave you a right to talk to her?

**xXxXxXx**

After all, I was born useless, though you were the night doll I needed to feel at the tips of my fingers and crush up to my heart when things felt destroyed. I'd never had anything of that, all I had was the totems.

You rewound my life and started it all the way over.

This time I had you instead of a grate; you made it feel like family number two was my family all along. Like I'd never been dropped like a kitten to a world that would eat me and drip my blood from its lips.

**xXxXxXx**

You turned off this false film—I was back in the streets and the merciless world—and ran me over when you touched her.

**xXxXxXx**

I was hiding behind a glass pane of spiders when you kissed her and told me, "This is my girlfriend, Miku." She was beautiful and I never ever thought for a second that she wasn't, not even now. Like a princess, goddess.

She was your match, you two were such beautiful spirits shoved into bodies that could only go so far to show how you acted inside.

And her beam, your hand on hers, threw me further down under the numbers until no one could ever ever find me ever ever again.

Never has it stung so much to smile. I would have smiled easier when being put through a meat grinder.

I would have smiled more if you had died under my nails.

**xXxXxXx**

The sky coloured envy asked me, "Why?"

...

It _wasn't _envy.

I was never that childish. I'd been honed to be ice for years and years; never would an emerald plant covered in spikes grow from my throat.

I didn't like her because she was a rat in the walls of the family tree that you were growing back for me, strong and tall and never tainted with my blood links.

When she chewed up the walls and vomited the stolen souls over our heads; when that tree fell, we'd both die.

**xXxXxXx**

"Len?"

"Yeah?"

"What are you... I mean, I was wondering if tonight we could, uhm, study together?"

"Aw, Tei. I'm going out with Miku tonight. Maybe tomorrow?"

I will sit and stare at the phone and you won't call back; I will sit on the table between you two and scream vulgar words until my throat peels like paper and you won't see me.

**xXxXxXx**

Why...was she winning?

After all, I was useless.

**xXxXxXx**

If I could have killed her, I would have killed her.

I, at first, even now, try and believe the slightly nagging, tendrils butterfly kisses in my head; I bet you were...lying to her. You were going to draw her in, butcher her, just for my meal?

If I had believed this completely...

If I had believed that completely;

If my imagination of you serving me pieces of her body from your mouth had really meant anything, and if it wasn't just simple child's play,

Then I wouldn't be here, would I?

She'd torn my skin from my body with her eyes, and I know she meant to do it.

She one-upped me in everything, she was that thing you wanted on every day, and you stopped coming to school and finding me sitting on the wall and grinning up and me and helping my body that was always more scared to get down then to go up the wall.

If she was pretty all through, I was the frog who gotten ran over by you, remember?

I wanted to say what I'd done wrong and grovel for appreciation, to say how I felt and hoped for a warmer heart, to the gate.

Holding onto the very last bit of me when I watched you walking with her stopped me from going back to the confessions.

I slammed my eyelids down and saw you with me in the abyss; you were the smoke, and I had never seen anything like this before. I whispered to you,

"I want her to die,"

And you said, "Why?"

And I said, "A sky coloured envy. A river coloured agony. A dismembered corpse coloured my love."

I opened my eyes and you were still holding her hand.

**xXxXxXx**

If I could have killed her, I would have killed her. The knife just felt too heavy and I could see your azure eyes reflected in the blade.

If I had... What would you do?

**xXxXxXx**

I'd been flayed.

I would have killed her, if I could have killed her, because I always saw you in the knife, I couldn't do it with that.

**xXxXxXx**

Sometimes I feel like I'm a little higher than the rest of the world; like I'm on a different paint layer and I'm being hidden.

I can slip through the cracks, and when I touched the side of her face and said I was sorry he loved her, I had slit the canvas to shreds.

I was being seen—I was the straight out seven billionth.

She'd opened the door for me and let me inside, awfully friendly, as if she knew what I was going to do and wanted to go down a saint. I followed in and wiped my feet and swapped my shoes and touched every single book on the racks when she led me into the house.

I'd wanted to kill her a thousand ways, but I always strayed away from the blades, because I never wanted you to have to see this film.

I asked if I could see her basement, and she cocked an eyebrow that could have easily have been drawn with a fine tipped pen, and gave in to this odd request. Flittery, sallow-eyed Tei wasn't a problem, if she'd wanted she could have easily thrown me down the stairs if she wanted to be rid of me. She led me to the room of the house that was under construction.

I knew this because when I wasn't being left on the highway under the rain, you spoke to me about her and all her news and her self and her thoughts and her body and her, her.

Perhaps, at that point, I should have stopped thinking of you, because if I had, things would have ended differently.

I observed the unpainted and uncovered walls as we descended the steps. She was ahead of me, and I made sure to not tread on her hair. It was longer than mine. I'd been forced to cut it to my elbows not long ago. I wanted her hair.

The walls were made of splintery wood, the floor concrete. We left the stairs and I ran my fingers against the wall and watched her back.

"Why did you—" She abruptly stopped when she heard me kick off a board from the wall foundations.

I picked it up, and it felt like the posts of the fence I would hang onto as a child and lean over and stare out into the horizon and want to fly. There were nails at the end, bent and twisted, and for a second, I wondered if the sky had possessed me long enough to give me the strength to do that.

Miku looked confused for a second, a bit upset, but trying to pretend she wasn't. "Why did you...? I'll have to get dad to repair that now. Why did you kick it?"

And I replied with a chest of dried blood, "A dismembered corpse coloured my love."

I swung the board at her, stopping my breathing before she could stop hers, and she hardly even tried to run. She cringed and brought her arms up to her face, screamed with the voice that wasn't heard.

The nails embedded into the muscles of her arm and I imagined the tearing whispers as I dragged the metal to her shoulder. She was screaming, gasping more than that actually, and her hair was spattering with her own blood as she struggled. I wanted to comb the strands from her eyes when she collapsed, so she could see more—pin her eyelids open so she could see how I was replaying exactly what she had done to me.

I detached the nails from her arm, and swung it at her again. She felt it coming and threw herself flat to the floor so I couldn't hit her head; however she had no chances of avoiding as I lodged the weapon into her side.

Her voice bubbled into her throat, her eyes slipping so wide I thought she'd lose her own eyelids in her skull. Her body arched; arms threw out to try and push me away, kick me, but I was just wondering; I hadn't put up a fight when she'd done this to me, so why on earth was she?

She was weak and not as strong as me, then.

I ripped the nails down her skin, digging deep so I felt them catching and aching to rip on her ivory ribs, her skin sobbing like a child, afraid. Her bones were causing a problem—after all, what was the justice, I thought as I tapped the metal nails against her ribs; she was so outrageously skinny that I could have seen her ribs already through the shadow of her skin. Len could've.

It made me more furious to hear his name. None of the yells I was holding inside came from my lips. I brought the weapon down again to her gasping body with all my strength.

Her cracking bones were audible.

I dropped to my knees and wound my fingers through her soft hair. Some imprints of ruby red tattooed my palms; if Len had been using her just for me, his best friend, then I would have already tasted that blood while wearing a dress and holding a fork instead of a post of beach and escape and flying.

Her mouth was open, and I could see down into her throat where her throat was contracting and spasming with her unequal gasps. Her eyes were heavily lashed and staring into mine, as if screaming, _"Please, please, stop."_

I laid my palm on her cheek, delicately. She felt like silk. Her skin was hot. Her arm was thrown off her body awkwardly, bleeding all over her pigtails; with one hand I moved away her hair like she was a baby with a hundred broken nerves on fire.

Her teeth grit tight, but she refused to blink. I wondered if her eyes were stuck that way; she was making herself enjoy this show permanently. She whispered, "Tei...why are you doing this?"

How cliché a question. How easy an answer. I delicately put the board down but her eyes did not follow it. "I'm sorry he loves you."

'_Len,'_ she mouthed hollowly. I didn't nod for her—I knew she knew that she had guessed right. I hitched up her silver shirt until the bottom rim of her bra was visible; I curled my fingers into the hole in her side that I'd emptied. When her blood and body met my hands, it was like when me and my second family, the family that hadn't fixed me the way Len had, had emptied out pumpkins on Halloween. Some chipped-off shards of bone fluttered around in all the crimson, and she whined when I brushed them away.

She squirmed and meant to attack immediately when my finger hooked under her thin layer of skin—how skinny could one girl be and still earn true love, not pity—and as a warning I picked the weapon up again and drove the nails into her other wrist and out the other side. She _wouldn't_ try to push me off, because I hadn't tried to push her.

I had bared it. As she would.

Like paper, tattooed with teal, sweat, glitter beams, lying, whispering, stealing, with pathetic sweet words, her skin tore down her side.

I had thought it'd be easier—her muscles were winding and were an enemy to me—the blood slicked my fingers and made me lose my grip. Her hand looked immobile like a dropped marionette when I unlodged the nails, and instead took the metal to help me thin out the skin around her chest and stomach.

Spider web cuts cried blood before they were torn deep apart.

The whole time, Miku was _weak_—she was flailing, kicking me, trying to turn and get away but I held her deep in place. Tearing apart her skin and muscle, with a speed and eagerness like that of a child unwrapping a Christmas present, sent her eyes in and out of drunk focus. Her ribs all stuck out to me and for a distracted moment, I played a quick tune-less song with my fingernails against them; a song that Len had played to me the first time I'd gone to his house and we were going to go to the corner store—he played his iPod loudly and handed me a headphone and we bopped the whole way there.

I set down my hand into the warm pool of her blood swimming on the earth of her muscles and bones. I touched the knobs of her spine, moving down right til I touched her red-soaked skin again, by her tailbone, by the nerves. I stroked back up her flayed back like she was a cat. I didn't think she felt it.

She was a patchwork now—her left side, around to her back, down to her jutting sea shell hip bone and up to her arm was all a lava-flooded jungle city. I ripped off the skin around her navel just to make it look more symmetrical. She had stopped writhing at my touch long ago.

She'd...passed out, was it? Slept? How pathetic. I stayed awake the whole time. I'd breathed and tried to kill the world with my mind; I'd remembered how my lips felt brushing against grates and Len was a spirit in the apocalypse world in my head—but I didn't slip this way, the way she had.

**xXxXxXx**

Her skin, once a pasty white like snow and like ivory Roman sculptures of romance and nudity, was tattered red.

A red like my eyes.

I still thought she was beautiful, unfairly.

**xXxXxXx**

A straight out seven billion, I thought once again, as my nails nipped at her lips. If I pulled hard enough, if the sky coloured envy possessed me for a long enough second, she string-doll ripped. I wanted to tie all her pieces of skin back together, I wanted to conserve this beauty, but I didn't want the soul inside.

A straight out seven billion,

was what reflected in Len's eyes when he stepped to the top of the stairs with a baseball cap turned down on his eyes and wearing this and that and everything I knew him to be and I smiled up at his blank face, the way his knee gave out on him like he'd been hit—I said simply, "I said 'sorry' for you. Now you don't have to worry."

**xXxXxXx**

I'd lasted for five months with her picking away at me like a raven at the side of a highway. I'd stared straight ahead, smiled at my fake parents, held myself at night, made myself up in the morning and hoped he'd notice, and all the while she was sawing out the words 'envy' into my flesh.

She'd lasted twenty minutes, less?

"She's _dead, _dammit!"

"But I apologized for you. Don't you feel better now?"

"Why the fuck would I—Tei, get away from me. You're disgusting, _disgusting—"_

"You loved her... When you loved her, _you_ brought it upon her."

"Go die."

I closed my eyes and watched him go. Hands pressed me backwards. There wasn't smoke, there wasn't Len in the dead world behind my eyes.

The tree burned like the cities.

**xXxXxXx**

I opened my eyes after...so long. I didn't remember an earth beyond the darkness.

When I let the world consume me again,

I saw a rusted grate, drawing thatch shadows into my lips and cheeks.

I didn't know how I had gotten there, but my clothes were white and I had a thick bracelet on my ankle. It felt like handcuffs, but I knew it wasn't. My clothes were so soft, it reminded me of her silk skin under my fingertips.

I pressed my lips to the rusted grate and whispered in my newly raw, skinless body, "A sky coloured envy. A river coloured agony. A dismembered corpse coloured my love. I loved him, forever, and ever, and ever, and ever..."


End file.
